This graph doesn't look too different from the last one, but the dates are quite different.

The projected cross-over date here is April 15, 2000, nearly a month away from previous projection of May 8. I'm not sure how this could be, especially considering Yahoo's average daily rate of growth was half of the previous month's, and ODP's growth rate went up a little. April 15, 2000 is only 11 days later than the actual.

The average daily growth rates for the time frame of this chart (June 5, 1998 to January 25, 2000) for each directory are: Yahoo - 1,170 and ODP - 3,484

The projected date for ODP reaching 2 million here is June 30, 2000, which is not too far from the previous date of July 3, 2000, but 45 days earlier than the actual.

There was a slight dip in ODP listings in late February, due to a big clean-up job by ODP editors. The pace quickly recovered to normal levels. Yahoo's size also dropped a few thousand sites in late February. Somehow I doubt it was due to a clean-up effort by Yahoo editors. :-|

Projected dates are now April 11 for cross-over (7 days off), and July 10 for ODP reaching 2 million (35 days off).

There's a huge gap since the last chart because I was slightly busy moving halfway around the world at the time.

The cross-over date was on April 4, 2000, with ODP having 1,636,849 sites and Yahoo, 1,636,313.

The projected date of ODP reaching 2,000,000 was August 9, just 5 days off the actual.

The average daily growth rates for the time frame of June 5, 1998 to July 24, 2000 for each directory were; Yahoo - 528 (nearly half the previous calculation of 927) and ODP - 3,444 (still on the rise; up from 2,722 as of the previous calculation).

There's a huge gap since the last chart because I was slightly busy being employed and updating other pages at the time. The incentive to do an update came when I noticed ODP had just passed 4 million (December 3, 2003)

The projected date of ODP reaching 4.5 million is August 19, 2004 and 5 million on April 28, 2005. The projected date of Yahoo reaching 3 million is September 17, 2005. Hey, that's my birthday! :)

Question: How do you get size counts for Yahoo, considering they don't publish their figures?Answer: By going into each top-level category and adding up the numbers given for each second-level subcategory. Thanks go to ODP editors ederd, donjuan46 and karim for going to the effort to do just that. Karim has now created an automated script to do this job.Search Engine Watch reported that Yahoo had 1.2 Mil listings "in April of 1999". I took creative license and presumed that meant April 1.
On November 17, 1999, ODP founder Rich Skrenta said "We recently crawled Yahoo to determine the size and composition of their directory. The raw URL count was 1.67 million sites, vs. 1.15 million for the ODP."
The closest figure to 1.15 million that I saw the ODP have on the front page was 1,148,000 on November 8, so I put the 1.15 million figure there, thus making sense to put the 1.67 million figure in Yahoo's spreadsheet cell for November 8.

Question: I work at Yahoo. Need some help with accurate sizes of our directory?Answer: I thought you'd never ask. Really. Please contact me to prove me wrong when I say that humans don't work at Yahoo.